


Just The Usual

by fabrega



Category: Almost Human
Genre: Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 19:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2704196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When you were decommissioned, I used to wake you up," Rudy admits. "Quite routinely, actually. You and I kept each other company; we had many spirited discussions about life, the world, all kinds of things."</p>
<p>"We did?" Dorian sounds surprised, and pleased. "What else did we do?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just The Usual

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladygray99](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygray99/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! This prompt was a gift itself, and I hope you like how it turned out. :)
> 
> Thanks are owed to S, my beta, and to K, for providing the hand-holding and cheerleading required to get this done.

The first time he reactivates DRN-0167, Rudy tells himself he just needs an extra pair of hands. The bot frowns at him, stretching his limbs as though he is aware of their long period of disuse, as though Rudy hasn't been performing meticulous maintenance on the veritable army of DRNs he has hanging in bags. "I thought you said I wouldn't remember anything," the DRN says, his tone more puzzled than accusatory.

"I didn't realize I'd need you," Rudy replies, trying purposefully to be brusque. He's not mad at the DRN--he's mad at the Police Chief, for caving to the pressure and putting away so many bots, so many of them still clever and competent and good; he's mad at the precinct and at Captain Maldonado, for not putting up more of a fight when the word came down to decommission so many good officers; he's mad at himself for presiding over the whole sorry affair that was the decommissioning, for not holding a protest or a sit-in or a walkout or at least _something_. (He'd written a strongly-worded letter. He would swear he'd caught a glimpse of it on the tablet containing his personnel files during his next yearly review, tilted down so he could see it, like a warning.)

"Need me?" the DRN echoes. It has been the better part of a year since the decommissioning, and Rudy has almost forgotten how emotional the ones with the Synthetic Souls can sound. The DRN walks over to the table where Rudy is already elbow-deep into a malfunctioning MX.

"It was that or grow a third arm, and reactivating you seemed easier. Hold these," Rudy says, thrusting a handful of wires and cables at the DRN. His eyes flicker up to the bot and back down to his work several times in quick succession. The DRN complies wordlessly, and Rudy works in the ensuing silence for as long as he can manage before he begins muttering to himself about the circuits he's adjusting. He doesn't realize he's doing it until the DRN replies and they're suddenly deep into an argument about the slightly tweaked Bayesian learning algorithms between the DRN and the MX lines.

He stops up short when he realizes. He smiles.

("I'm sorry," Rudy tells the DRN as the bot lies back on the table, readying himself for re-deactivation, "You probably won't remember this either."

The DRN smiles at him. "Then why apologize?")

*

The DRN--he answers, apparently, to "Dorian", showing an appalling lack of creativity on the part of his previous partner--turns out to be an excellent lab assistant when Rudy is in need of one: fetching things, carrying things, holding things, occasionally pointing out mistakes Rudy's making because it's 3AM and Rudy is tinkering instead of sleeping.

"Do you ever sleep?" Dorian asks him.

Rudy chuckles and doesn't lift his head from his work. "You get enough sleep for the both of us," he says.

He means all the time Rudy has to have him turned off, hanging in the storage area, just one in a (slowly-dwindling) line of DRNs. He means it as a joke, ha ha funny, a little bit of kidding between friends, (or colleagues or something, you know), but Dorian does not laugh, not exactly. Rudy registers it a second too late, when he looks up into Dorian's melancholy smile. He swears and apologizes, and Dorian says it's okay.

*

He doesn't wake Dorian for a while after that, feeling guilty for doing so in the first place, feeling guilty for not doing so more often. The MXs are working well enough, even if everybody finds them dreadful and boring, and he rarely gets or needs any time alone in the lab.

Then the trouble happens with the XRN. Even as it's happening, Rudy knows somewhere in the back of his mind that he really ought to keep his head down and his nose clean when it's over; he's on record speaking highly of Lumocorp, and in this climate that's going to be enough to earn him a little extra scrutiny.

When it's over, he showers, shaves, and takes a short nap before heading back to the lab--they've been on for three straight days, after all--and when he gets there, he finds Captain Maldonado waiting for him. Well, she is probably waiting for him; she is standing with her back to the entrance, staring at the long row of deactivated and decommissioned androids.

"Would we have room to store all the MXs for a while, if we needed to?" she asks.

He does some quick math. "Not here? I suppose we could shut them off and store them standing in the charging stations short-term... Why?"

She turns, and Rudy sees now how exhausted she looks. He's not sure she's had a chance to leave the station yet, on for three days and counting. "There are people questioning the wisdom of our having bots out on the streets in light of the last few days."

"Detective Kennex?"

Maldonado nods. "Among others. And if I'm honest, I'm leaning towards agreeing with them."

"Are you joking?!" The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. The Captain raises an eyebrow at him, but her face is curious, not angry; emboldened, he continues, "Now is the time to have _more_ MXs out, unless you want to scrap that whole program too. They need to be _seen_ : patrolling, helping people, doing their jobs, being carried out of the carnage downtown in pieces--whatever will remind people that they're not the same as the bloody thing that's been terrorizing everybody for the last few days. You _bought_ them to be different than the RN series, and you need to remind everybody of it or you're going to have a lot of expensive parts for scrap on your hands." He glances at the bagged DRNs behind Maldonado, eyes lingering longer than he means to on one particular bag. "A lot _more_ expensive parts for scrap," he amends. (He tries to keep the dark note of anger out of his voice but does not quite succeed.)

Maldonado pinches the bridge of her nose, looking somehow even more tired than before. "You make a good point, and I'm going to need you to make it again in our meeting with the Police Chief tomorrow. Now, I'm going home to bed."

Rudy doesn't sleep that night, just wanders back and forth in the lab, checking and rechecking his tools and his equipment and his files and the deactivated bots as though something might have changed in the minutes since he last looked. On what feels like his hundredth pass through this nervous routine, he pauses in front of the bag that contains Dorian. He knows he shouldn't, and there are no excuses he can make about work this time, but--

"Are you any good at chess?" he asks Dorian as the bot eases up into a sitting position. It's a stupid question; that much processing power, of course he's good at chess. Computers have been good at chess since before Rudy was born. It's a very human question to ask, and he's not going to think about what that means.

"Nothing to hold today?" Dorian asks. He's teasing--is he _teasing_ \--?

Rudy shakes his head. "Nothing physical." He pulls his old holo-chess board out of a drawer and unfolds it on the lab table. With the press of a button on the side, the pieces flicker to life above the board. Rudy stares at the pieces for one long moment--dark in front of his lab stool, light in front of the stool he's dragged into place for Dorian--before flipping the board around, evaluating again, and flipping it back.

Dorian watches silently as Rudy settles himself, and then he tells the board his opening move.

He lets Rudy win the first game, but none of the others after that.

*

"Where are they going?" Dorian asks one evening, out of the blue.

Rudy looks up from his tablet; they'd been in the middle of a spirited discussion about the usefulness of mandatory sentencing in drug crimes when he'd gone searching for a specific source to cite and gotten distracted. Somehow he had ended up engrossed in the schematics of a project he's working on in his personal time. "Where are who going?" he asks.

"The other DRNs. There are fewer of them every time you reactivate me." Dorian sounds almost worried; then again, in his position, Rudy certainly would be.

"Well," Rudy says, thinking back, "A couple of them have been sold for parts. A couple have been bought by other agencies--parking enforcement, food inspection, that kind of thing. But most of them, they've gone to private companies."

"Do you know what they're doing?"

Rudy smiles a sour, apologetic smile. "Mostly manual labor, I think. A whole batch of them went to a janitorial service, handyman type stuff. They'll be sweeping floors and replacing light bulbs, probably."

Dorian leans back against the lab table (a little heavily, Rudy thinks). "I guess I shouldn't have asked."

"It's my fault," Rudy interjects, "I really shouldn't have--" _turned you on again_ , that's how that sentence ends, and Rudy bites down on it instead of saying it. "I'm sorry."

"Have you reactivated any of the others?"

Rudy's tablet is suddenly very, very interesting. "No," he says quietly, "Just you." He steals a look up at Dorian, and Dorian is smiling.

*

When Rudy enters the lab again, through the back door, he is instantly on alert, because it sounds like someone is being brutally murdered. Well, okay, he doesn't exactly know what a murder sounds like, if he's called in on a case and a murder is involved, it is typically after the actual murder, but, it definitely sounds like someone is in a great deal of pain. He'd only gone for about four minutes. Before that, he and Dorian had been deep in a discussion about whether one or more gods exist, and he'd gone to use the toilet and now... what? The lab is supposed to be a safe place; nobody was supposed to come into his lab and murder _anybody_. There wasn't anybody _to_ murder, just Dorian--shit, shit, had somebody found Dorian? If they'd tried to deactivate him--but he wasn't programmed to be violent about that kind of thing--but then again, none of the DRNs had been programmed to--

There are not a whole lot of weapon options available to Rudy between the back entrance and the source of the terrible noise, so he grabs a fuck-off big syringe from the lab table (it's no good at range, but injecting the basically liquid plastic that it contains into an intruder's neck will make their day a lot less pleasant) and holds it as menacingly as he can as he creeps forward.

He rounds the corner and there is...Dorian. Just Dorian, opening and closing his mouth in time with the noises, like he's--he _is_ making them.

"What are you _doing_?" Rudy asks loudly.

"Yodeling. Quite badly, I think," Dorian says, as though that explains anything.

"Uh, okay. Why?"

"You left your tablet unlocked on the table when you left." Dorian gestures to it. It's obviously been moved, and Rudy snatches it up and holds it protectively close to his body. Dorian doesn't offer any more explanation, and then Rudy remembers the requisition order he'd received that morning, one DRN to assist the NSF with a difficult expedition into the mountains somewhere to perform important experiments at high altitudes.

"Did you just search the internet for 'things to do on a mountain' and go with the first result?"

Dorian doesn't answer, just grins and starts "yodeling" again. It's a ridiculous noise, somewhere between a bellow and a caterwaul, and Rudy is lucky he somehow manages to hear the main lab door squeak open over the din in time to shove Dorian into the back room of the lab. "You're not supposed to be _on_ ," he hisses at Dorian, who probably moves at the shove more out of surprise than the actual force of it.

"Quiet. Got it." Dorian nods at him.

Rudy closes the door and turns to see Detective Kennex poke his head into the lab. "Hello? Is everyone okay in here?" Rudy knows John Kennex vaguely--they've never been friends, but Rudy has supplied information about cases Kennex has worked, and they've had several relatively pleasant conversations at department holiday parties.

"Detective Kennex! John!" Rudy greets him, his voice full of forced, nervous cheer. "Can I help you?"

Kennex eyes him suspiciously. "I was outside and heard a noise like somebody was being bludgeoned to death in here, just wanted to make sure you're okay."

"Oh, yes, we're all fine here, I am definitely fine here. I was just..." He pauses, searching for an excuse. "...yodeling." He tries and fails to stifle a cringe. "It helps with the concentration sometimes." To demonstrate, Rudy concentrates very hard on the ceiling and lets out his closest approximation of the noise Dorian had been making. It is a slightly different kind of terrible, he can tell, but Kennex winces anyway. "I don't usually do it when people are around," he continues, his tone of voice and the speed at which he is speaking approaching desperate, "That's probably why you've never heard it before. I mean, you _are_ here late--why are you here so late?"

"One last round of checks before heading out for the evening," Kennex says. He shrugs easily, grins. "We've got a big raid tomorrow."

"Oh, well, everything's in order here," Rudy says, a little too quickly.

The look on Kennex's face says _I wasn't actually going to check here, but good for you, buddy_. "Have a good night, Rudy."

"You too," Rudy answers, waving awkwardly at Kennex's back as the detective leaves the lab. He double-checks that Kennex pulled the door all the way closed behind him before letting Dorian out of the back room.

"Your yodeling is terrible," Dorian tells him.

"So is yours! I could do better, but I didn't want him getting suspicious."

"Riiiight, I'm sure."

Rudy opens his mouth to argue, or at the very least demonstrate some much better yodeling, but he almost immediately thinks better of it. He closes his mouth, then opens it and starts again: "Okay, just a few things. One: don't touch my equipment without asking. That's not a Dorian rule, that's a rule for everybody. Two: you are, you are ridiculous, you wouldn't need to know how to yodel to perform maintenance on high-altitude scientific equipment. You'd need a cold-weather coating, maybe a parka, some mittens. Three: if you needed to yodel, you wouldn't need to learn it yourself; you'd just wake up and _know_ it, which is, yodeling aside, a really envious position to be in. And four: you're not getting sent to that job, so it's all unnecessary anyway."

At this last, Dorian looks at him quizzically. "Why not?"

"You...you're just not, trust me."

Dorian looks over Rudy's face, like he wants to press the issue, like he wants to ask _why not_ and _then who is_ and _what are you saving me for_. He doesn't, though, and Rudy's thankful for it--he wouldn't have any answers for Dorian, just the sense of anger and unease and impending loss he gets when he thinks about sending Dorian away.

(He probably doesn't have to say anything anyway. He's always had a terrible poker face.)

"I know they'd teach me to yodel if I needed to," Dorian says, instead of anything else he could say. "This was just my only chance to be bad at it."

"Well, good news, you were _terrible_ at it."

"Thanks, man. I was really trying." Amusement crinkles the edges of Dorian's eyes, and he nudges Rudy with an elbow. Rudy jerks at the contact, startled, and Dorian laughs.

*

It is a long week in the wake of Kennex's failed raid, the one that kills a third of Kennex's team and puts Kennex in a coma, the one that destroys a good chunk of the MXs and leaves them with far more questions than answers. Rudy's called on the carpet multiple times; nothing is his fault (nothing is anyone's fault, or all of it is everyone's fault) but there are a number of questions about the MXs' behavior that the PD might not ever have satisfactory answers for. He spends what is probably an unreasonable amount of time in the lab trying to extract any kind of data--intel, footage, logic matrices, anything--from the MX parts they've brought him.

He doesn't sleep, not nearly enough. The Captain says something to this effect when she comes in on day six and finds him basically where she'd left him the day before. Rudy doesn't realize it's been a full day until she says so; he's pretty sure he hasn't changed or slept or maybe even eaten?

"Get out of here," the Captain says. "Get some sleep. Eat real food. See a movie or something." Rudy starts to protest, but Maldonado raises one finger (orange polish on the nail, Rudy notes) and cuts him off. "Don't argue. This is a purely selfish thing on my part. You're no good to the department or to me if you've run yourself ragged." It is not a selfish thing and Rudy knows it, but he appreciates the pretense. "At _least_ talk to somebody. That's an order, Doctor."

After a silent argument with himself, he pulls Dorian down and reactivates him. The Captain had basically _insisted_ , right? It had been an _order_.

Dorian looks him up and down and says almost immediately, "Rudy, how long has it been since you slept?"

"Are you scanning me?"

"Are you getting any sleep?"

"Those things are unrelated," Rudy protests, but he lets Dorian steer him into the back room and onto the bed he has there. (He'd had a cot in the back room for a while, but when it became apparent that he was sleeping in the lab more often than not, it would have been stupid not to upgrade his accommodations.) He feels like he is eight and up past his bedtime again, half-expects Dorian to tell him a story or bring him a glass of warm milk. He _knows_ he shouldn't fall asleep and leave Dorian with full, unfettered access to the lab, not after the Great Yodeling Incident of What Is Somehow Only a Week Ago, but--

He wakes up and several hours have passed. The lights of his not-quite-a-bedroom have been dimmed, a blanket has been tossed over him haphazardly, and Dorian is seated on a chair by the door.

Rudy stretches and groans, and Dorian smiles and says, "Good morning, sunshine."

*

He puts in a makeshift charging station in the back room, cobbles it together from spare parts and a sense of boredom and something like obligation. He's been charging the deactivated DRNs in the storage room anyway; what difference does it make if one of them charges somewhere else occasionally?

(Rudy would never, ever admit it, but he gets more and better sleep when Dorian is there, sleeping too.)

*

"Are you lonely?" Dorian asks one evening, apropos of nothing.

Rudy is bent over the lab table, doing delicate work on an MX's faulty wiring, and he stiffens but immediately tries to play it off. He forces what he hopes is a convincing-sounding laugh. "What? No. No. Why would you think that?"

Dorian ticks reasons off on his fingers. "One, I have never seen another person in here in all the times we've hung out--"

"That's because you're not supposed to be active," Rudy says, noticing that they're _hanging out_ now but leaving it alone, "If anybody saw you, I'd be in trouble and you'd be in the next shipment out of here--"

"Two," Dorian continues without acknowledging Rudy's interruption, "My clock syncs every time you turn me back on, so I know how often it happens." Rudy doesn't even manage a full protest this time, and Dorian keeps talking, "Three, you _sleep_ here, man. That does not suggest an active after-work social life."

"My work is very important!"

"You're lonely."

"You're ridiculous! I'm not lonely."

He's right, though, Rudy _is_ lonely. Dorian is right. His job is solitary and his social life, such as it is, even more so. He spends his days with the MXs--dreadful company--and his nights on the internet, tinkering on projects that aren't quite for work, and sleeping. He goes to see a sexbot sometimes. They often talk, occasionally fuck, and never play chess.

*

When Rudy answers the knock at the lab door, he does not expect to see a pretty young woman in an oversized coat and high heels. Behind her, an MX is retreating back towards the station, and Rudy looks at her in puzzlement for probably a moment too long before asking, "Hi, can I help you?"

She starts speaking, quickly, in a language that Rudy doesn't understand. He backs away from her and rifles through a cabinet until he finds a translator, apologizing even though he's pretty sure she doesn't understand him either. He goes through the steps to set it up, cycling it through languages--Russian, Arabic, Maori, Punjabi--but he stops up short when he hears a collection of syllables he recognizes.

She registers his recognition and repeats: "Ru-dy Lom?"

Rudy blinks at her rapidly, unbelieving, then places his hand on his chest, palm flat against his breastbone, his heart hammering underneath. "I'm Rudy Lom," he confirms.

Her face lights up (and Rudy's heart hammers a little harder). She places a hand on her own chest and says, "Jenica."

"Jenica, okay, it's, uh, nice to meet you?" Rudy continues flipping through languages on the translator but it is less useful now, because she has stopped talking and is instead staring at Rudy hopefully.

"Husband?" she finally says.

"What? No, I don't have a husband-- wait, are you looking for _your_ husband? Missing Persons is a different department entirely; I have no idea how you ended up here, but we'll get you sorted out, hang on." He tucks the translator under his arm--Detective Nixon in Missing Persons is smart, but he probably doesn't speak whatever it is that Jenica does--and puts a careful hand on her shoulder to steer her out of the lab.

Jenica shakes her head fiercely. "No! Rudy Lom, husband!" She gestures to herself: "Wife!" and then gestures to Rudy: "Husband!"

"I'm sorry, what?"

She pulls a small piece of plastic paper out of her coat pocket and gives it to Rudy. He touches it, and its contents flicker to life. It begins: _CONGRATULATIONS on your purchase!_

Rudy's eyes flick to Jenica. She doesn't look like a bot, but god, he hopes she's a bot.

_JENICA is a fine specimen_ (Rudy winces) _and should cause you no problems. May your marriage be long and happy!_ What follows is a record of vaccinations and tests--she's clean, apparently, and doesn't have syphilis, Hepatitis C, or tetanus--and then a copy of what looks like a bill. The number listed there is staggeringly high ( _almost_ , his brain offers, _like I've just purchased a person_ ) and at the very bottom is a digital print that Rudy knows matches his secure signature. He checks and double-checks the timestamp on the invoice; he didn't make the purchase himself, he's sure of that, but he's not sure how or who--

He thinks back. They'd had an all-hands meeting that morning, and then he'd spent the rest of the day in the lab with Detective Paul's MX, digging around in its brain, trying to get it to recognize people's faces again. It had been slow going and the thing had ended up being faulty anyway; he'd activated Dorian at some point, because he needed--

Dorian. It has to have been Dorian. He'd pulled everything out of his pockets before he worked on the MX's circuitry, because static electricity and heavy magnetic pull and things like keys and bitcoin wallets were not great in combination, for the MX's head or Rudy's pockets. Now that he thinks about it, that had been the day that Dorian had asked him if he was lonely. In retrospect, he ought to have been paying more attention to the things he had set down, and probably also his tablet--he'd thought that he and Dorian were on the same page about the "not touching Rudy's stuff" rule after the Bad At Yodeling Incident, but, it turns out, Dorian was slightly less than clear about that.

"I technically never agreed to your rules," Dorian says when Rudy pulls him down and demands an answer. "And I wouldn't touch your stuff unless it was important."

Rudy probably ought to be flattered that this is something Dorian thinks is important, but there are more immediate things he needs to be processing and dealing with now. He's hooked his bitcoin wallet up to his tablet and has noticed that the total is less than he expected, even taking the "purchase" of Jenica into account. "Where did the rest go?"

There is a knock at the lab door. "Both of you, in the back room now!" Rudy hisses at Dorian, and Dorian collects Jenica without argument and shepherds her into the back of the lab, away from prying eyes. Rudy takes a moment to compose himself--smoothes down his apron and his hair--and then turns to open the door. A detective Rudy doesn't really recognize is standing there. There have been a number of changes in the department since the unpleasant business with Detective Kennex, and Rudy isn't ashamed to admit that he hasn't quite learned all the new guys' names yet. There are rumors that they're filling some of the, uh, newly-open positions with MXs, and even more farfetched rumors that posit them giving every human detective an MX partner. Rudy will believe that one when he sees it.

The detective Rudy doesn't recognize, a stocky woman with elaborately-braided hair, is standing impatiently in the doorway of the lab, holding several boxes stacked on top of each other. When Rudy opens the door, she shoves them at him and scowls dramatically. "Not sure why these didn't come to your loading dock," she says. "You should get your personal deliveries at home." She's already turning on her heel and heading back to work.

"Thanks?" he calls after her, shifting under the unwieldy stack of boxes. One is long and wide and flat, another is smallish and rectangular, and the third is a squat oval. "What the hell?" he says, mostly to himself, as he maneuvers the boxes through the lab door.

When Rudy closes the lab door behind himself, Dorian's head pokes out from the back room. "About the rest of your bitcoins..." he says.

Rudy sets the boxes down on the table. Each one bears his name and a shipping label, from a fancy clothing store downtown that Rudy's never felt like he made enough money to set foot into. He opens them one by one, starting with the largest; once all three have been opened, he is in possession of a _very_ nice suit, a matching set of shoes, and a rather dashing hat. All of it is nicer than anything Rudy has owned for a very long time.

"They're all your size," Dorian offers. "Try them on!"

Rudy has to admit, it's tempting, especially that _hat_ , but there are more pressing matters at hand. He shoves the boxes aside and glares at Dorian. "How and _why_ did you buy me a _person_?"

Dorian looks genuinely shocked. "I didn't buy you a person. I bought you a date."

Rudy pushes the paper Jenica had given him across the lab table. "You bought me a mail-order bride," he says as Dorian scans the paper.

"The craigslist posting looked nothing but above-board," Dorian begins uncertainly.

Rudy barks a laugh. "Craigslist?! Nothing legal has happened on craigslist in well over a decade, Dorian--"

"How was I supposed to know that?"

"You're a police officer!" Rudy finds himself shouting, arms flailing.

"I'm not, though, am I!" Dorian shouts back, raising his voice for the first time Rudy can remember. _That_ shuts Rudy up, and in the long awkward silence that follows, Jenica ventures out of the back room (where she'd been pretty unceremoniously deposited earlier) and waves at them both--a small, careful movement. She says something Rudy doesn't understand, and he makes a move to finally get the translator set up.

"She wants to know when the wedding is," Dorian says. He sounds resigned.

Jenica smiles at Rudy hopefully.

"She'll have to buy me dinner first," Rudy says. It's not a very good joke, but he's not sure what else to do.

"I really didn't know, man," Dorian says quietly. "I mean, what kind of human trafficking organization would deliver to a police station?"

"Not a very smart one, that's for sure." Rudy says it almost off-handedly while he is fiddling with the translator, but it hangs in the air for a moment before it clicks.

When the whole thing is over, fourteen people of various genders have been rescued; three very bad, very dumb men have been arrested for a variety of trafficking- and violence-related crimes; Rudy has only lied to Captain Maldonado a _little_ bit (he and Jenica _had_ met on the internet, technically, sort of); and he's been presented with a certificate of recognition and a handshake from the Police Chief herself. They're even able to recover what had been deducted from Rudy's wallet to "buy" Jenica (he'd hand-waved it away to the Captain; the purchase had been necessary, of course, for some reason). It turns out, though, that Jenica is from somewhere beyond the wall, and also really ridiculously smart once Rudy's able to understand her, so instead of sending her back, Rudy spends the recovered money on a place for her to stay, evening ESL classes, and a fast-tracked refugee citizenship application.

He ought to return the suit, but he doesn't. "Niiiice!" Dorian says, grinning, when he exits the back room wearing the full ensemble late one evening. Rudy tips the hat at him and proudly grins back.

*

The number of DRNs he has in the store room dwindles, slowly. He tries not to think about it, which would be easier if he wasn't also in charge of keeping inventory.

*

"Not a lot of us left," Dorian says with a faint, resigned smile. His eyes scan the hanging bags in the store room; only two other DRNs remain. (One of them is already spoken for, but Rudy sure as hell isn't going to bring that up now.) "Maybe you should have me holding stuff again. I'm getting out of practice."

"You'll be fine," Rudy says. "Everything will be fine."

*

"Kennex destroyed his MX," Captain Maldonado tells Rudy. The urgency with which she'd called him to her office was not lost on him, and now she leans forward, propping her elbows on her desk.

Rudy boggles at her. He had barely heard that Kennex was back on the force and somehow he is already destroying things.

"It's a new record, I know."

"Have you impressed upon him how very expensive MXs are?" Rudy asks. He sighs, thinking about the pile of MX pieces he's no doubt going to be receiving soon. "And how difficult they are to fix when they're broken? I don't think I can have anything ready for him any earlier than next week."

"Instead of giving Detective Kennex another MX, I had a different idea. What about your DRN?"

"I thought the DRNs weren't allowed to-- wait, _my_ DRN? He's not--"

Maldonado fixes him with a wry look that says _you really think I don't know what goes on in this precinct?_ "Dorian, right?"

Rudy gives up and nods. "He's due to be shipped out to NASA next month."

"Do you think he and Kennex would be a good fit?"

After a moment of hesitation, Rudy answers, "It'd work better than an MX, certainly."

"Then it's decided. If NASA complains, send them to me and I'll handle it." She nods to Rudy. It's a cue for him to leave her office, he knows, but he turns back to face her at the doorway.

"Captain?" he says quietly, "Thank you."

She looks surprised, but it's hard to tell how much of it is genuine. "You solved _my_ problem, Rudy; I should be thanking _you_."

"I know, I just... thanks."

*

"I told you I'd think of something," Rudy says softly to Dorian's prone form. There's a little bit of prep required to get Dorian ready for his new partner, mostly physical--topping off his charge, a standard bacterial sterilization routine, and patching up a couple of minor cuts and abrasions Dorian had picked up over the course of three or four years of being on more than the other DRNs. As he applies fresh skin and thinks about what led to each little injury, he wonders suddenly if he should wipe Dorian--not entirely, Dorian still needs everything he's learned during his time as an officer, but what good would the evenings he spent talking about world problems and watching Rudy eat takeout and listening to Korean pop music and staving off whatever passes as existential dread for androids actually do him? It wouldn't make him a better partner or a better cop. The only person it really benefitted was Rudy, and that hardly seems fair.

He makes a backup copy or two--one on the lab's computer system, one on a USB stick--and then deletes the memories from Dorian's brain. He takes the stick out of the computer and taps it thoughtfully against his chin several times before taking it into the back room and stowing it in a drawer with the few other things Rudy wouldn't admit were important to him.

*

"How long was I out?" Dorian asks when Kennex wakes him up. His clock ought to have synced when he woke up, but that it didn't is probably a side effect of the memories Rudy pulled out of him. Rudy's not going to say anything.

"Four years and three months," Rudy answers.

*

Rudy knows that police work is a dangerous business--and that partnering with Kennex is historically, provably so--but the number of problems Dorian comes back to the lab with are almost enough to make him regret agreeing to the Captain's plan to pair them up.

(Almost.)

"I told him you'd have a really big issue with the chewing gum," Dorian says, when Kennex finally brings him in to the lab for full diagnostics and for Rudy to patch the hole in his forehead.

That he'd yelled at Kennex about it in front of everyone had probably made that obvious, but Rudy answers anyway. "Damn right I do." His voice is more strident than he means for it to be. He shoots a dirty look at Kennex, who only shrugs in return.

He expects Kennex to leave once Dorian powers down for repairs, but instead Kennex settles in on one of the lab chairs and watches as Rudy works. "So what's so special about this bot?" Kennex asks. "Detective Paul brought in his MX in pieces the other day and you didn't give him shit about it in front of everybody."

Rudy feels his cheeks heat up, but doesn't look up from his work. "Are you two friends?"

"What, me and Detective Paul?"

"No, you and Dorian--are you friends?"

Kennex snorts a laugh. "I'm not sure that's the right word. We're...partners." Rudy can feel Kennex's eyes on him, studying him, and he is very careful to keep working, calmly and steadily. "What about you? You and Dorian, are you friends?"

Rudy doesn't answer.

*

He ends up telling Dorian about the memories anyway.

"Those memory files of the conversations we had--do you still have them?" Dorian asks.

"Probably kicking around somewhere, yeah," Rudy says.

"I'd like them." Dorian smiles.

*

"Are you sure about this?" Rudy has found the USB stick containing the memories he'd pulled from Dorian, (okay, "found" is a strong word, he's always known exactly where it is, but feigning a search gave him time to think about it for himself), and he waves it at Dorian in a warning way.

Dorian grins at him from the table where he's seated. "What's the worst that could happen? I couldn't possibly think you were any _less_ cool."

"That hurts," Rudy says, straight-faced, "That really hurts." He plugs the memory stick into the computer and plugs the computer into the port on Dorian's neck. "Okay, this might, uh, feel a little weird." He types a series of commands, readying the transfer, and hesitates for just a moment before adding the final command.

Almost as soon as he does, Dorian says aloud, "Oh, _shit_."

"What? Did it not work?" Rudy is pretty confident that it didn't not work, because he is great at what he does, but he asks because it's better than some of the alternatives he can think of.

"I really bought you a mail order bride." It's not really a question, more a sort of shocked realization that Rudy had been telling the truth earlier.

"She still messages me occasionally! She's most of the way through her degree now." Rudy scrolls through the files on his tablet, finds a recent photo, and waves it up on screen. Jenica is seated next to a stack of textbooks and is smiling at the camera.

"Why would you think I wouldn't want these memories, Rudy?" Dorian asks.

"You weren't supposed to be up at all; we'd have both gotten in trouble." It sounds a little hollow to Rudy even as he says it. "I didn't think it was anything you'd want to remember."

"Well," Dorian says, grinning, "You were absolutely wrong."

*

"I've never seen these two before in my life," Kennex says. He is straight-faced and serious as he stares down the bar bouncer, a big man who is holding a handful of Dorian's shirt in one hand and a handful of Rudy's in the other.

"We have you on security footage coming in with them, Detective," the bouncer says. "And you're sitting together."

"Nope, no idea who they are," Kennex says again, shaking his head emphatically. "All these beers are mine." He puts out both arms and pulls all the beer glasses on the table--Rudy's current beer glass, and all of Rudy's empties, Rudy notes--towards him. "It was a rough day."

"We found them yodeling in the men's room." It's true, and Rudy cannot stifle his giggle at the bouncer's declaration. "They're being asked to leave, and if you don't escort them out, I'm afraid you won't be welcome back either, Detective."

Kennex sighs, settles the check, and shoves Rudy and Dorian towards the exit. "I asked you idiots not to ruin my bar," he grumbles at them.

"But the _acoustics_ ," Rudy says. "The tiles in that men's room--"

"You," Kennex says, waving a finger at Rudy, "You, I expect this from. But you?" He turns and points at Dorian. "You should know better."

Dorian doesn't respond, just offers a yodel to the rainy night sky.


End file.
